technology and innovation report
With Cloud First, you uncover value faster
Post Covid-19: The future of digital public services services Irish Government CIO at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, Barry Lowry, discusses the acceleration of digital public services use and the influence on the forthcoming National Digital Strategy. Highlighting the acceleration of digital services since the outset of the pandemic, the Government CIO believes that changed habits are here to stay and must be built upon if Ireland is to achieve its digital first ambitions. Speaking in broader terms than government alone, Lowry points to significant shifts in purchasing habits but also in businesses, with digital pervading in sectors in ways that were never thought possible in 2019. “Circumstances have forced organisations to rethink the entire way in which they work, and they have had to respond, or they wouldn’t be here,” states Lowry, emphasising that governments have also had to change. The CIO is quick to point out that while the past two years of pandemic have served to accelerate uptake and interaction with digital public services, acceleration has built on a trend of constant improvement. Gov.ie, the central portal for government services and information didn’t exist in 2016 but by 2019 it had 76
achieved a “very respectable” five million hits for the year. However, between January and April 2020, the first few months of the pandemic, the portal had over 35 million visits. Lowry points out that Gov.ie became to “go to” source of detailed information during the pandemic covering everything from infection figures to accessing emergency benefits and obtaining Digital Covid Certificates. Similarly, the number of verified MyGovID accounts also saw exponential growth from below 500,000 in early January 2020 to over 630,000 accounts in early May. Again, this was a spike that was building upon a steady growth from 8,300 in 2016 to 447,000 in 2019. In 2020, this figure almost doubled to 929,000 and at the end of September 2021, almost 1.3 million verified accounts existed, meaning almost 40 per cent of the Irish adult population now have a MyGovID verified account. The figures mean that Ireland has moved ahead of many heavy-hitting digital countries and research by
